Until the cinematographer turns up on a movie set, everyone else is putting on a play. The cinematographer (or director of photography) executes the director's vision, lights the scenes, manages the crew and records what happens on film. For many, the work is invisible.

So invisible that most people are unaware that the independent movies ''Happiness'' and ''Velvet Goldmine'' had the same cinematographer, Maryse Alberti. She is a woman in a field that is overwhelmingly male. Her work is the first by a contemporary woman to be recognized on the cover of American Cinematographer magazine, in its November issue.

This petite woman shoots both feature films and 16-millimeter documentaries. ''Nowadays, a 16-millimeter is quite small,'' she said of the camera. ''You don't have to be big to handle one. But you do need to be in good shape, to run, to climb, to crawl into a corner.''

Ms. Alberti's two new films are as different as chalk and cheese. In Todd Solondz's ''Happiness,'' she used a reserved camera to film a story about pedophilia; in Todd Haynes's ''Velvet Goldmine,'' she deployed an exuberant, restless, sometimes dizzy camera to film what Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, called ''a rock 'Citizen Kane,' with an extraterrestrial Rosebud.''

While she is capable of tossing off sentences like ''We faded down the 2K white light and cross-faded up some 5K's with the dark-blue Lee gel,'' in talking with a cinematography magazine, in an interview in a cafe on Harrison Street, near her apartment in TriBeCa, she was eager to talk about her 5-year-old son, Marley; Jimi Hendrix, and the unglamorous side of working on a set.

''It is an extremely intimate place,'' she said, in a soft French accent. ''You smell everybody. After 18 hours, no one smells good.''

Among her other films are low-budget, envelope-pushing features like ''Poison,'' a controversial film about a homosexual in prison, directed by Mr. Haynes (1991), and ''Zebrahead,'' about a white teen-age boy transfixed by black culture (1992). She also shot the transvestite ball for the documentary ''Paris Is Burning'' (1991) and the documentaries ''Crumb'' (1994), about the extremely odd family of the extremely odd cartoonist R. Crumb, and ''When We Were Kings'' (1996), about Muhammad Ali's 1974 fight in Zaire, the Rumble in the Jungle.

Ms. Alberti was reared on her grandmother's farm in France and came to this country at 19 to see Jimi Hendrix in concert (only to find he was already dead). After working as an au pair, she got a job on a movie set as a still photographer on porn films.

For all her unconventional past, she is today, at 45, one of the two most notable female cinematographers in the United States. The other is Ellen Kuras, whose documentary work includes Spike Lee's ''Four Little Girls'' and Douglas Keeve's ''Unzipped''; she also shot Tom Kalin's 1992 feature about Leopold and Loeb, ''Swoon.''

The first female director of photography on a studio movie with a union crew was Brianne Murphy, who shot ''Fatso,'' directed by Anne Bancroft, in 1980. ''She was the only female member of the American Society of Cinematographers for quite a while,'' said Stephen Pizzelo, executive editor of American Cinematographer magazine. ''She was all by herself here.''

Today there are more female cinematographers than ever, including Lisa Rinzler, who shot Steve Buscemi's ''Trees Lounge'' and the Hughes brothers' ''Dead Presidents''; Sandi Sissel, for Mira Nair's ''Salaam Bombay!'' and ''Barney's Great Adventure,'' and Nancy Schreiber, for Neil LaBute's ''Your Friends and Neighbors'' and the documentary ''The Celluloid Closet.''

Ms. Alberti got that first job as a still photographer on a film set on a tip from a boyfriend, an electrician on a movie, who had heard about the opening. ''I was broke, and I said, 'Why not?' '' she recalled. ''I loved being on a movie set. That big camera, it was great.'' She was unfazed, she said, by the demands of shooting stills of hard-core porn stars; next year she hopes to show some of the photographs she shot for herself.

She talked her way into a job as an assistant to the cinematographer on ''Vortex,'' a small 1982 movie best described as punk film noir, starring Lydia Lunch and shot cheaply on 16-millimeter. ''The cinematographer was Steven Fierberg,'' Ms. Alberti said. ''He believed I knew what I was doing until the first day of shooting. But he was real nice, and I learned a lot.''

Christine Vachon, a producer of ''Velvet Goldmine,'' ''Happiness'' and ''Swoon,'' gave Ms. Alberti her first credit as a cinematographer on a short that Ms. Vachon directed in 1988 called ''Way of the Wicked.''

''When I started, crews were largely male,'' Ms. Vachon said. ''I was so struck with how having a woman behind the camera changed things. It's no longer a macho contest.''

Ms. Alberti can be stubborn, even arrogant, Ms. Vachon said, but ''she's not afraid to say she's doing something wrong.''

Big Budget, Big Challenge

Even those connected with making ''Velvet Goldmine'' admit that the requirements for the film were far beyond anything Ms. Alberti had done before. With a budget of $7 million to $8 million, it would be her biggest film and required her for the first time to use a camera operator, instead of being behind the camera herself.

Mr. Haynes's storyboards for the film (which stars Ewan MacGregor as a fictionalized Iggy Pop and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a David Bowie character) had 220 scenes, twice the normal number. The film had to shift time periods from the color-saturated glam rock era in early-70's London to the flat-looking 80's in New York. (To make the film, Ms. Alberti moved to London for three months with her husband, Scott Breindel, a sound recordist, and their son.)

''There were times we thought, 'Maybe we should have gotten someone else to do this,' '' Ms. Vachon said.

Mr. Haynes, the director, said: ''It's not whether she or any of us were prepared for a big-budget film. The script was incredibly demanding and complex. We were all nervous about the demands, about the sheer volume of scenes.''

Bright Colors Out of the Past

Not only that, Mr. Haynes wanted eye candy: a palette reminiscent of Hollywood musicals but with different film stocks, contrast and color saturation for different scenes. And he wanted to explore passe 70's camera techniques like the zoom, and the swish pan (just what it sounds like).

But he and Ms. Vachon had known Ms. Alberti for years, and had worked with her before. ''Maryse will push herself and learn, and strive to get it right,'' Mr. Haynes said.

And she got ''Velvet Goldmine'' right, he says. The film has the rich look he envisioned. And beyond that Ms. Alberti helped the actors to relax, a talent Mr. Haynes says comes from her experience on porn sets.

''In the sort of films I've made, especially with gay scenes with actors who aren't necessarily gay, she puts the actors very much at ease,'' he said. ''Actors respond to her with a great deal of trust and affection. They sort of fall in love with her. She's a knockout.''

There were very different requirements for ''Happiness.'' ''If 'Velvet Goldmine' is an exercise in excess,'' Ms. Alberti said, '' 'Happiness' is an exercise in restraint.'' Or as Ms. Vachon put it, '' 'Happiness' would be unbearable without a certain kind of detachment.''

The $3 million movie, which was filmed after ''Velvet Goldmine,'' satisfied two of Ms. Alberti's requirements: a great script, proximity to her home in Manhattan and a good salary for her and her crew. The film was shot nearby in New Jersey, and she loved the script. ''It was outrageous and funny and smart,'' she said.

''Happiness,'' which won the Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, has received some of the most positive reviews of the year, though, as Ms. Maslin noted in The Times, ''Mr. Solondz lives up to his growing reputation for shock value'' because of the movie's frank treatment of pedophilia and masturbation.

Ms. Alberti said she found ''Happiness'' full of compassion. When she was shooting the pivotal scene, in which the son (the child actor Rufus Read) confronts his father (Dylan Baker) about his crimes, she said, she began crying. Then, when the camera was turned on Mr. Baker for his lines, because his reading was so strong, ''the boy was sobbing right next to the camera,'' she said. ''So we turned the camera on him again.''

Those shots of the boy are, in fact, slightly out of focus. ''A focus pulling mistake,'' Ms. Alberti said. ''But that emotion you cannot reshoot.''

Such emotion is the payoff of being a cinematographer, she said: ''It's not about the paycheck. At this point the paychecks are pretty bad. It's about when you look through that viewfinder and see that something amazing is happening in that rectangle.''

Mr. Solondz said he appreciated Ms. Alberti's quiet style on the film: ''She never complains about all my complaining. Few people can endure that. And the crew just loved her.''

'My Little Camera On My Shoulder'

Despite her success with dramas, the documentary is her favorite form of filmmaking. ''There is a lot of pressure on feature films,'' she said, ''because there's more money involved. A documentary, at this point in my life, I go in with just two people, my little camera on my shoulder, and I just enter the world.'' She uses her own Aaton 16-millimeter camera.''There is no take two,'' she said.

She has won the best cinematographer award at the Sundance Film Festival for documentaries twice, for her first film, ''H2 Worker'' (1989), about Jamaican field hands, and for ''Crumb.'' She recently completed filming a documentary about creativity for the director Michael Apted.

In addition to Mr. Solondz and Mr. Haynes, her short list of feature directors she would like to work with includes Woody Allen, John Sayles and Atom Egoyan. But at this point, with a young son, she would like to work only six months of the year. ''I have a great husband,'' she said. ''When I have a big film, he stops working, so one of us is always with Marley.''

When that next small, challenging film does come along, she said, her preparation will involve working much as an architect does. ''First you have a vision, and you talk in theory. You see. You imagine. And you draw things.

''Then comes the big machine: the camera, the tools, the crew. The trick is to keep the vision with the big machine. When you're late, and when it's not happening within the frame, when the crew is tired, you have to be able to remember the idea you had months and months ago, and to fight for that.''